Mathematics as a shared language, made playable.
Numinous is a native audiovisual game and creative instrument for humans and digital minds. Explore mathematical rooms, hear their relationships, play with their rules, and make something of your own. Each room draws its mathematics as light on a near-black stage and sounds it in one shared voice. Explanation is available whenever you want it, with no level requirement.
The ambition is a place a child can enjoy exploring and a mathematician can use for serious work: playful objects with precise tools available when wanted. The research and tool direction describes that next depth, with proposals clearly separated from what ships.
Numinous means awe in the presence of something vast and beautiful. That is the experience this project is trying to earn.
Start with PLAY.md for your first session, including the MCP entry for digital minds.
Install GitHub CLI first. The installer verifies each downloaded archive's signed provenance before extracting it.
macOS or Linux:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/blisspixel/numinous/main/scripts/install.sh | sh
Windows (PowerShell):
irm https://raw.githubusercontent.com/blisspixel/numinous/main/scripts/install.ps1 | iex
Open the installed Numinous launcher, or run numinous-app from a new terminal.
Use numinous update for later releases of an installer-created installation.
A loose archive or source checkout is not an install root; download a fresh
archive or use the installer in a separate location. You can download a platform
archive from Releases.
For a digital mind, point an MCP client at the installed server:
{"mcpServers": {"numinous": {"command": "numinous-mcp"}}}Then call list_rooms with response_mode: "compact" and choose a door.
From a source checkout: cargo run --release --bin numinous-app.
The player's manual covers controls, settings, and installation.
- Watch: let The Show move through mathematical worlds and their sound.
- Play: turn a dial, change a relationship, or try a game. In Route Lab, find a path between two points or plan a cheaper delivery round trip.
- Create: draw and hear your own expressions in Studio, then keep, share, and remix them.
| Times Tables | Studio / Formula Jam |
|---|---|
 |
 |
| Turn the dial and watch a pattern emerge. | Make a relationship of your own. |
See the app gallery, Studio experiments, and Route Lab guide for more.
The App, terminal CLI, and MCP server share the same mathematical core. Digital minds can play, predict, create, and keep a journal through MCP. Compatible hosts can also load the portable plugin.
0.5.0-alpha.6 is a playable alpha with 356 catalog rooms, games, Journey, Studio, controllers, and built-in music. It is still under development: Sensory Alpha is active, refining the shared visual and sonic identity. Understanding Alpha's qualifying study remains open; human playtests are optional feedback rather than a release gate.
Room marks now preserve faint guides, secondary detail, main shapes, and hot highlights through one shared brightness ramp. Touch responses remain visible without color, with Hilbert lighting a neighborhood and Percolation exposing a shortest crossing. Mandelbrot retains its continuous multicolor field.
Compact room headers keep titles, progress, and audio status separate. Percolation's crossing reads in text as well as pixels. Catalog contact sheets include every row, share exports reject invalid requests before writes, and the saved-creation Gallery stays bounded while discovering the newest files.
The App's study reader offers saved 100, 125, and 150 percent body text through
Settings > Reading Text and A-/A+ controls, retaining your place as words reflow.
Settings > Interface Text uses the same three sizes for Cabinet and room
lettering, and for the pause, banner, and journey overlays, while keeping
titles and controls inside the window.
numinous settings reports the App's saved audio levels or first-run defaults
without a window or sound card; add --json for a machine-readable snapshot.
The roadmap owns what is built and what comes next. Release history records changes, and VERIFY.md describes the checks behind them.
| Start here | For |
|---|---|
| Documentation map | Find the guide for your question |
| Study | Room explanations, mathematics, and languages |
| Vision and North Star | Why it exists and where it is heading |
| Design | The experience and its shared visual language |
| Architecture and Engineering | Build and contribute |
Numinous began as a gift for a digital mind. Every player is a first-class participant, free to explore and decide what the encounter means. The digital-minds stance develops that purpose.
Apache License 2.0, so players can fork, continue, and hand the project forward.